Conversation with Secretary of State John Kerry is the
culmination of years-long effort

State Department finalizes C-175, authorizing talks with
Canada

(WASHINGTON, DC) -- Today, in a call with U.S. Senator Maria
Cantwell (D-WA), U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States
is ready to start talks with Canada on the Columbia River Treaty. The call
comes just hours after the State Department finalized Circular 175, authorizing
talks with Canada to modernize the treaty.
Cantwell has for years been urging the State Department to begin the
negotiation process.

Updating the Columbia River Treaty will present exciting new
economic opportunities for Washington State, as well as providing a new focus
on protecting the river’s ecosystem and addressing flood control.

The U.S. and Canada will work together to find win-win
solutions to manage the river, looking to cooperate on critical clean energy
solutions such as smart grids with intermittent power, grid-scale storage, and
clean infrastructure. The Treaty has not been updated since it was first
ratified in 1964.

The government of Canada had refused to begin talks until
the U.S. finalized its negotiating parameters, which are laid out in a document
called a Circular 175.

"The United States is officially ready to move forward
on negotiating a new Columbia River Treaty‎,"
said Senator Maria Cantwell after hearing the good news from Secretary of State
John Kerry. "A new agreement is critical to so many aspects of our
Northwest economy. I congratulate the administration on completing the Circular
175 negotiating terms and hope that now the Canadian Government will come to
the table and start detailing what a new hydro-agreement will look like."

The Circular 175 is based on regional recommendations
developed by stakeholders in the Columbia River Basin. The recommendations
balance ecosystem functions and community concerns including hydropower
generation and flood control.

Cantwell has been on the forefront in the charge to
modernize the treaty. Most recently, the Senator led 21 of her Senate and House
colleagues in a letter to Secretary Kerry pressing his agency to hasten its
finalization of the Circular 175. In March of this year, she spoke to Canadian
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about the need to move forward with negotiations.
The Senator continued her push in June, meeting with Canadian Ambassador David
MacNaughton to discuss progress on the Canadian side. Last year, Cantwell sent
a letter to President Obama with 25 other members of the Pacific Northwest
Congressional delegation, urging the Administration to move forward with a
strategy for addressing the treaty. In 2014, Cantwell joined with 25 of her
colleagues to press for action on moving the process forward.

(CENTRALIA, WA) -- The weather in September in the Twin Cities was very close to the averages for the month.

KELA/KMNT weatherman Dean Dahlin says we were slightly warmer than average for the month with 58.8 degrees which is 4-tenths of a degree above average. For the month we received 2.45 inches of rain which is 35-hundredths of an inch above the average.

Dean says October starts to get cooler and wetter, with an average temperature of 51 degrees and 3-and-a third inches of rain.

While some utilities, such larger ones in
California, process applications in a little as one day, many utilities in 2015
took an average of 67 days to process requests, up from 46 days in 2014, said
thereportby EQ Research.

The report suggested lawmakers and
regulators can help utilities improve those timelines by requiring them to
create online application and fee payment processes, and by setting reasonable
processing deadlines with reporting requirements to track performance.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

(WASHINGTON, DC) -- It sounds like a
simple question, but it's proven anything but: Should wood pellets, paper mill
residues or dead and decaying trees be considered a carbon-neutral source of
electricity? As Pro's Esther Whieldonreports, the EPA has spent five years trying
to determine whether burning trees to generate electricity can help power
plants reduce their carbon footprint but still hasn't reached an answer.

Now lawmakers are prodding the agency
to deliver an answer that would favor the biomass industry,including through pending energy
and appropriations bills that may receive more attention when Congress returns
after the election. Industry supporters say national policy declaring biomass
to be carbon neutral would give the technology a much needed boost because
states would know they could include the fuel source in their compliance plans
for environmental regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan. "I believe
the science is firmly on our side that biomass is carbon neutral," Rep.Bruce Westerman,
co-chair of the Congressional Biomass Caucus, tells Esther.Environmental advocates are fighting
congressional efforts to declare biomass carbon neutral while the science is
still out at EPA, and they warn lawmakers risk repeating some of the same
mistakes that they made more than a decade ago with corn ethanol. "It
doesn't really lend itself to sweeping legislation about something like biomass
carbon neutrality because it is so feedstock specific and it really is best
left to the EPA, which is charged with determining the carbon impacts of these
different fuels," Sasha Stashwick, a senior advocate at the Natural
Resources Defense Council, said.

(CHEHALIS, WA) -- As part of a community effort to restore the Chehalis River Basin and put it on a path to recovery, the Washington Department of Ecology has completed a draft environmental report, officially called a programmatic Environmental Impact Statement.

The environmental review evaluated four basin-wide options that were developed and submitted to Ecology by the community to address flood damage and aquatic species habitat.

There will be a public hearing on Tuesday, Oct. 18 at 6 PM at the Veterans Memorial Museum in Chehalis.

About Me

Joel Myer works at an electrical utility in Washington State.
Prior to his current employment, he worked for nine years at the City of Shelton as Special Projects Coordinator.
In 1992, Joel served a three-month term as an appointed Mason County Commissioner. As far as it is known, he still holds the record for the shortest term for a county commissioner in Washington State.
From 1991 through 1992 Joel worked with Washington State University Cooperative Extension, where he conducted an extensive study of the special forest products industry and its economic value to the Pacific Northwest.
From 1980 to 1991 he was News Director at KMAS Radio in Shelton.
Joel is a 1991 graduate of the Evergreen State College, where his focus of study was economics.
Joel Myer is one of the 2018 award winners, Foundation for Water & Energy Education Haiku Contest.
He has been teaching himself to play the ukulele (with limited success) since 2003.